Monitor Israel’s West Bank Settlements On Your iPhone

The latest peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians might be over almost as soon as they’ve begun, all over Israel’s reluctance to continue a freeze on building settlements in the West Bank. But whether or not Israel continues its moratorium, set to expire on September 26, a leading peace activist group has created an application that allows anyone with an iPhone or a Droid to play amateur settlement monitor.

Facts on the Ground, available starting Monday on the App Store and the Android Market, maps Israeli development in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It’s developed by Americans for Peace Now, the U.S. adjunct of Israel’s top dovish organization, who just found a new way to pressure Israel to get out of the West Bank. Is Israel ready for app-based activism?

The application dramatizes the density of Israeli settlement activity. Settlements appear on the app as blue boxes on a scalable Google-built map of the West Bank and Jerusalem — lots of them, packed on top of each other, hint hint — complete with a green demarcation of Israel’s pre-occupation 1967 border and a yellow line representing the outlines of Jerusalem. Pinch in on any particular settlement and learn when it was built; how many people it houses; how its population has grown, going back 20 years; how big it is; how ideologically committed its residents are to settling. There are links to news stories and videos about selected settlements and outposts.

Other settlement maps, especially the industry-standard ones compiled by the Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem, are static, Web-1.0 snapshots (PDF) of Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank. But Facts on the Ground “will update constantly to breaking events such as settlement/outpost construction, outpost removals, or settler violence,” according to Ori Nir, a spokesman for Americans for Peace Now. In other words, when APN thinks Israel is creating an obstacle to peace in the West Bank, everyone who downloads the app can see what the group flags.

The app has its limits — functional and, inevitably, political. One of the biggest West Bank settlements is Ma’ale Adumim, a 35-year old town of nearly 34,000 just outside Jerusalem. A blue trend map on Facts on the Ground’s info bar for Ma’ale Adumim shows that its population has increased steadily since 1990. But it doesn’t clearly show the baseline population from 1990, making it difficult to gauge just how rapidly the population has grown — an important issue for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who argues that construction in the settlements to allow for so-called “natural growth” in their populations is diplomatically distinct from settlement expansion. Also, the map doesn’t allow a viewer to gauge exactly how a settlement is from the ’67 border.

Then there are the political questions about the app. Write-ups of the settlements are terse enough to appear politically neutral, but unavoidable political assumptions are on display. Residents of Ma’ale Adumim received millions in subsidies and incentives from successive Israeli governments to reside in the settlement. So for the app to describe its population as “mixed (national-religious/secular)” misses a fair amount about why Israelis live there. That’s important, because if there’s going to be a Palestinian state, at least some Israeli settlers are going to have to leave the West Bank — though Ma’ale Adumim may be “traded” for Israeli territory — and settlers who came there for the cheap mortgage are going to be easier to move than those who arrived for religious or political fanaticism.

Still, the app poses a challenge for the Israeli government. The key takeaway of the app is how densely the Israelis have settled the West Bank: there are blue boxes everywhere. One of the issues that doomed the 1990s-era peace process was continued Israeli settlement expansion. That occurred mostly out of view of the international public. But no one can hide from GoogleEarth, especially if data from it comes right to peoples’ phones. It’ll be a lot harder for Israel to disclaim knowledge of settlement growth, inevitably an issue in peace negotiations even if the moratorium continues.

It’s also significant how lonely Facts on the Ground is as an activism effort. Right now, most Israel-related apps are mostly touristy projects about finding good restaurants on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. (You can, however, download MyPalestine, a Palestinian heritage app that veers into anti-occupation rhetoric.)

Facts on the Ground represents an early attempt at turning the App Store into contested geopolitical territory. It surely won’t be the last. Don’t be surprised to see apps popping up that show, say, where Hamas rockets fired from Gaza have landed on southern Israeli towns; or the latest anti-Semitic rant from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.